It appeared on the surface as though the House was embroiled in a procedural debate over whether the government should hand a bundle of confidential documents to the work and pensions select committee. A very important debate, of course: those documents will give us a better idea as to the sturdiness of the foundations upon which the government’s mega-welfare reform programme is being built. But it was not quite the one I felt we were really having.

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It was one example from my constituency that so moved Heidi Allen MP, and as a result brought the debate to the attention of many outside the House. Very few of the points I’ve raised in the House, or reforms I’ve proposed since being elected in 1979, have been on the basis of sitting down and having a think. Almost all of them have been in response to what is happening in Birkenhead.

There is no better tutorial for MPs than that which we are afforded by our constituencies. It takes time and a lot of work to keep in touch with our constituencies, but the tutorial we are then afforded remains in constant session.

The next reform I’m proposing to the House is a bill to ensure no child goes hungry in the school holidays. Feeding Britain has been trying to prevent this hunger – providing free meals and activities for thousands of poorer children in Birkenhead and elsewhere – and the next stage is to marshal enough political support to get the bill through parliament. 129 MPs so far have pledged their support.

Just as they have with the social evil of “holiday hunger”, it was the real-life stories from our own constituencies that electrified the House in yesterday’s debate on universal credit. Only in those circumstances does the House seem willing to put aside the barrage of statistics arguing this way, that way, and the other way, to engage fully with human plight and suffering.

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This is one of our many roles as MPs – to bring our constituents’ lives to the floor of the House. I’ve never experienced an occasion when a whole range of members have been able to do this, and the House not being moved in renewing its determination to act. Such movement has repercussions locally because local activists see their work being channelled into parliament and made effective. Likewise, people crushed by welfare reforms can see that their plight can affect what the House does.

There is a disadvantage to being plugged into one’s constituents’ concerns. Each weekend I return from Birkenhead with so many people’s struggles in my mind, and ideas on the reforms we should be pursuing to protect those people, that I am then frustrated by not being able to put them all into action right away. My constituents teach me so much about what is going on, I’m then flooded with ideas.

Here, we must learn how to prioritise the manifold injustices we confront in a way with which as many constituents as possible sympathise. Equally important is to help and support as many local action groups as possible – such as Feeding Britain – because good parliamentary performances alone don’t feed anyone.

It is good to have statistics to back up how common the experience of despair and injustice has become in modern Britain. But one real case of simple horror reported faithfully to the House is worth more than a thousand pages of numbers.